Findability is a Legitimate Concern for Bloggers

On Saturday, I posted a review of my session at WordCamp on Search and Findability. It was hard to gauge at that time how effective the session was at the time I wrote that. Beside my normal annual attendance at WordCamp as a subject matter expert, and several sessions at different WordCamps around the country over the past few years, I was there on behalf of Lijit.

In fact, when I pitched the session on search to Matt (as a core interest of Lijit), I was firmly instructed (as I suspected I would be) that hard pitching the company was off limits. From my perspective as a member of the WordPress community, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It was the same approach that we took at b5media. The company was represented. The company was known as a WordPress shop. We shared war stories with other WordPress shops. But no one on stage at any point pitched b5. It’s non-standard, I think, for any company to pitch their wares at any *Camp.

Instead, my session was about findability. Findability is the concept that content can be “found” by readers. This is a common problem that many bloggers wrestle with, and many have tried a wide variety of techniques to make their blogs more findable. This is not the same as SEO, though. SEO is a subset of findability. It’s findability for machines. Findability is as much about the data structure as the content or theme structure or the device compatibility (is it mobile compatible, for instance?)

Our product at Lijit tries to address a lot of the issues of findability. Re-search provides relevant search data to readers coming from the search engines (think landing pages). It makes all the bloggers content findable by indexing not just the site, but all the other related content associated with the user.

What I found interesting, and that I did not know when I wrote my post, was that the rest of the day would reinforce the core principles of my session. Tantek Ã‡elik expounded on Microformats. There was an SEO session. Numerous bloggers talked to me throughout the day explaining solutions that they have come up with for making a blog more findable. Solutions ranged from content practices, to theme structures to custom homegrown plugins that do various things. It was fascinating.

I realize now what I thought I realized then, but didn’t really realize until now. All bloggers are faced with the same core challenges. The challenges manifest themselves in different ways, but at the end of the day findability is on the forefront of everyones minds.

All bloggers want to drive traffic. Whether the traffic is internal, a key interest of those in the SEO/SEM/Ad space, or within their sphere of influence, an interest of bloggers looking to build their personal brand.

All bloggers want to provide value to readers. No blogger wants search engine traffic to go away. Everyone wants to find a way to keep that traffic and convert it into value, whether ad-driven or otherwise, for their blog

Bloggers are grappling with ways to break apart from the pack. 99.999% of blogs (a totally random number) really look the same at the end of the day. I don’t mean the user interface, but I do mean the theme structure. Structures are built in expected way, and modules/widgets are expected to behave similar ways, regardless of the blog

WordPress cannot solve all the problems of all the blogs. Keep in mind that WordPress is a tool, not a lifestyle. (And I’d say the same thing to social media aficionados). WordPress is evolving into something, but much of the value that bloggers can add, allowing themselves to be different or drive more traffic (see point 1 or 2), are created by smart people trying to bring a solution to a problem.

At the end of the day, every bloggers wants a kickass community of readers and commenters that reinforce their worth in the world. Kathy Sierra talks about creating passionate users, and she’s talking about principles of an engaged community. Findability helps the community engage.

Doing a 9am session is hard. Everyone is still sleepy, and/or hung over, jetlagged, etc. At the end of my session, I felt like I said what I needed to say. However, by the end of the weekend, I realized that much of WordCamp reinforced exactly the concerns that I brought up to kick off the opening session. That’s encouraging to me as a WordPress user and as someone who tries to understand the dynamics of the greater community. Of course, it encourages me as a Lijit guy as I see that our product can directly address many of the challenges that I heard repeated throughout the weekend.

Aaron Brazell is a Baltimore, MD-based WordPress developer, A Sr. Web Enginner at 10up, a co-founder at WP Engine, WordPress core contributor and author. He wrote the book WordPress Bible and has been publishing on the web since 2000. You can follow him on Twitter, on his personal blog and view his photography at The Aperture Filter.

I do think that the zero-sum nature of attention economics exacerbates the findability problem–which is challenging even when content creators aren’t competing with one another–even more gnarly. One-dimensional authority measures like PageRank and its brethren reinforce this competitive dynamic, making findability harder than it has to be. Personalized ranking might help, though I’m personally an advocate of transparent, dialog-oriented approaches.

http://thenoisychannel.blogspot.com/ Daniel Tunkelang

I just, uh, found this post and wanted to express my support for your efforts. My blog is devoted to findability and related issues: http://thenoisychannel.blogspot.com/I do think that the zero-sum nature of attention economics exacerbates the findability problem–which is challenging even when content creators aren’t competing with one another–even more gnarly. One-dimensional authority measures like PageRank and its brethren reinforce this competitive dynamic, making findability harder than it has to be. Personalized ranking might help, though I’m personally an advocate of transparent, dialog-oriented approaches.

http://www.guychaput.com Guy Chaput

Being found from a search engine result is how I get all my traffic to my blog but even still the traffic is very little and far in between visits.

http://www.guychaput.com Guy Chaput

Being found from a search engine result is how I get all my traffic to my blog but even still the traffic is very little and far in between visits.

http://bentrem.sycks.net Bernard D. Tremblay (ben)

What can challenge Semantic Web more than the blogosphere? Else-wise one might draw an inference from the rest of a site’s content … and that might work with some blogs. But with the peregrinations many/most blogs record, the taxonomy/ontology applicable to one post might not apply at all to the next.

BTW: good to see you posting such as this!

http://bentrem.sycks.net Ben Tremblay

What can challenge Semantic Web more than the blogosphere? Else-wise one might draw an inference from the rest of a site's content … and that might work with some blogs. But with the peregrinations many/most blogs record, the taxonomy/ontology applicable to one post might not apply at all to the next.BTW: good to see you posting such as this!

http://www.appuonline.com Appuonline

Can you share sources providing details for driving traffic to a blog?

http://www.appuonline.com Appuonline

Can you share sources providing details for driving traffic to a blog?